Kranking It

Kranking

First, there was krumping, the spasmic, freestyle hip-hop dance out of South Central L.A. You probably weren’t much good at it. It went global anyway. You might have it confused with crunk. That’s hip-hop, too. Southern, thumping, also fast. Usher had a hit with it a few years back.

O.K. Now it’s time to krank. This is not hip-hop. But it’s going to be huge. To experience Kranking®, you’ll need a Krankcycle®, and, for the moment, one of the few places you can find one in New York is at the Reebok Sports Club/NY, on Columbus Avenue. Avery Washington offers introductory classes. Picture ten Krankcycles in a mirrored room—they’re stationary arm bikes, basically, with just a seat, a suspended front wheel, and hand-pedals where handlebars normally go. On a recent morning, half a dozen women were Kranking, hands whirling in front of them, while a mixtape of Danzel, Janet Jackson, and Miguel Migs pounded from Washington’s pink-shelled iPod. Washington, an extensively muscled man wearing a red bandanna, and a certified Kranking instructor, was chanting, “Left, synch it, a little faster, come on, this is where you get the cardio, nice and smooth, right on, nice transition, left and right, both arms working together.”

Why will Kranking be huge? Because, for a start, Johnny G invented it. The last fitness program he invented was Spinning® (stationary bicycling in a group, basically). Spinning went beyond platinum, worldwide, and Johnny G, né Goldberg, rode the craze, which is still going, for all it was worth. He registered every Spinning-related trademark you can think of, did a licensing deal with Schwinn, and then sold it all, along with the instructor-certification program (a hundred and fifty thousand instructors in eighty countries), in 2005. Kranking is his comeback.

“It will be a slowish rollout,” Johnny G said, on the phone from California. “We’ll be in forty countries by March. I’d love to have ninety thousand units out there in the next three, four years. Then we’d be helping a lot of people.”

Helping people is Johnny G’s not-so-secret mission. As he writes in “Kranking® Trainer Philosophy,” a brief essay for the Krankcycle Web site, “It is my wish that all teachers and students realize their importance as human beings and strive for health, peace, wisdom, and success.” Johnny G is fifty-one, a former endurance cyclist, and speaks with a South African accent. There was traffic roaring in the background. He was sitting, he said, on a dune overlooking the Pacific Coast Highway.

The inspiration for the Krankcycle hit him in 2002, at a fund-raiser for challenged athletes. “There were a couple of legless people and, at the foot of the stage, a fourteen-year-old kid with a homemade hand cycle,” he said. “He was tenacious. So I had a go, and was absolutely exhausted in ten minutes.” The next frontier in the fitness business, Johnny G realized, was the upper body. He spent several years, and more than half a million dollars, developing and refining the Krankcycle.

Who came up with the name?

“I did,” he said proudly. “Came up with the spelling myself. The universe blessed me.” He gave a big, unironic laugh.

Back to Kranking class. (Come on, synch it.) Although Avery Washington makes it look easy, Kranking is not yet pulling in the crowds at Reebok Sports Club/NY. It could be the superficial resemblance to some onerous early-industrial assembly-line task—the sort of hard, silly-looking repetition that used to destroy a worker’s body in six months. It looks, let’s admit it, masochistic. Washington tried to mix it up for his group—“stand up, come round front, add some resistance, bounce into it a little”—but he admitted that he might need to mix it up more. “I think I’ll add jump ropes next week,” he said.

During a break, an older woman, slightly wild-eyed, came over. “I’m knocking all the time,” she said. She was talking about having trouble getting the Krankcycle to turn smoothly. “It’s driving me nuts. I love it, but I’m so upset about the knocking.”

Washington said, “You need to be in synch or you get that knocking.” This could be another possible disincentive. Johnny G himself mentioned “dealing with the clunk of the krank arm.”

You will be good at Kranking. It won’t be like krumping. You will realize your importance as a human being, and Kranking will be key. Krankcycles, by the way, won’t be sold through infomercials. They will be available to chiropractors and physiotherapists, but primarily they will be integrated into your workout through the certified gym-instructor network that has helped make Spinning what it is.

That means Avery Washington. He mainly teaches Spinning and body sculpt, which is also known as definition. “Every place calls everything different,” he said evenly. ♦

William Finnegan has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1984 and a staff writer since 1987.